the Friend INDEPENDENT QUAKER JOURNALISM SINCE 1843

CONTENTS VOL 170 NO 9

3 Thought for the Week:

Fairtrade Fortnight Judi Brill 4-5 News 6 A moral lead for bankers? Tommy Gee 7 The message from St Pauls Ian Kirk-Smith 8-9 Letters 10-11 Diseases of affluence Mandy Moore 12-13 Quakers and creation:

The unity of things Stuart Masters 14 God’s apostles Ken Veitch 16 q-eye: a look at the Quaker world 17 Friends & Meetings

We are all one, in a subtle but most significant way, one in the sense of being interdependent. I would not be as I am without you; you would not be as you are without me. At one level this is not difficult to understand. I realise how much I am the product not only of my parents' genes, but also of their emotional and intellectual influence which derived, in turn, from the ambience of their own family life, culture and education. And I am the product of my schooling, the intellectual ideas which have shaped my thoughts, my friends, my wife, my children – all of whose lives I, in turn, am helping to create.

This is easy to grasp. It is also easy to grasp how, for example, our tastes and addictions influence people far outside our range of knowledge. For instance, whether I prefer tea to coffee for breakfast affects the economy of, say, Sri Lanka or India, Kenya or Colombia. And this means that the lives of millions of people I have never met are affected. The whimsy of my taste buds may lead to the bankruptcy or the prosperity of nations, to revolutions or oppressions. Who knows? All we can be sure of is that everything we do, say or think cannot help having an impact on the totality, the All of which we form a part.

Adam Curle, 1992 Quaker faith & practice 29.07

2

Cover image: Embroiderer Rahima Khatun from Swajan in Bangladesh. Photo courtesy of Traidcraft:GMB Akash.

Fairtrade Fortnight, organised by the Fairtrade Foundation, runs between 27 February to 11 March. The Fairtrade Foundation is an independent non-profit organisation that licenses uses of the Fairtrade mark in the UK.

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the Friend, 2 March 2012